As Hurricane Milton approaches the west coast of Florida, millions of people are now under mandatory or voluntary evacuation orders — including people incarcerated in the state’s jails and prisons.
And as of Tuesday afternoon, some county jails located in areas where officials have issued mandatory evacuation orders were still housing inmates with no plans to evacuate them.
Manatee County, just south of Tampa, has ordered all residents in three evacuation zones to get out. But the inmates and staff of the county jail will stay put, even though the facility is in an area deemed among the most flood-prone in the county.
Manatee County Sheriff’s Deputy Brandon Harvey said approximately 1,200 people are currently incarcerated at the jail. Deputies and support staff, who provide meals and medical services, will also ride out the storm at the jail.
“We have supplies,” he said. “We also have a two-story jail, so we can go up to the second floor if it does flood.”
In Pinellas County, the jail is in Zone B, where a mandatory evacuation order is in place. Sheriff Bob Gualtieri has said people “need to get out of all the evacuation zones.” But the 3,100 inmates and about 800 staff members at the county jail will stay where they are, Sheriff Gualtieri said at a news conference on Tuesday afternoon.
He said some people in ground-level housing units will be moved into high-rise housing units in a “vertical evacuation plan.”
“With that number of inmates, it’s really not possible, feasible to evacuate people out of there, and it’s unnecessary, because we can go up,” Sheriff Gualtieri said. “Everybody will be safe up there.”
In Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, people at the booking facility, located in a mandatory evacuation zone, were evacuated to the county’s main jail Tuesday afternoon, a press officer said. Releases from jail will be suspended at 2 a.m. on Thursday to avoid sending people out into the storm.
Ahead of each hurricane, the Florida Sheriffs Association polls the state’s sheriffs about their available beds. If a jail needs to be evacuated, sheriffs know where they can send inmates, said Tommy Ford, the sheriff of Bay County and chair of the Florida Sheriffs Task Force, which coordinates mutual aid requests among sheriffs across the state.
Hurricane Helene forced jail evacuations last month in three counties on the panhandle and near Tallahassee, Sheriff Ford said.
At least one of those evacuations happened after landfall when the power went out, said Cory Godwin, jail services coordinator for the Florida Sheriffs Association. He estimated that no more than 40 inmates from Madison County were transported to another county for two days or so.
Jail evacuations are more logistically complicated for larger counties, Sheriff Ford said. Finding housing for 1,000-plus inmates “gets very difficult,” and transportation raises safety concerns.
“So it may be better to shelter in place,” he said. “Most jails are very hardened facilities.”
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